Proposals for Schema.org

This page attempts to offer a canonical list of public proposals for schema.org vocabulary extensions and improvements. We also have an issue tracker to monitor concrete actions, bugfixes and workflow, and the public-vocabs@w3.org W3C mailing list for discussions. Sometimes proposals evolve from offlist and face-to-face discussions; when possible, advance warning of 'expected' or possible proposals can be indicated here. (announced 24 Feb 2012).

Editor: Dan Brickley (danbri@danbri.org).

Status: Feel free to update the table for accuracy and detail, but discuss status-oriented changes with the editor to avoid confusion.

Proposals should include markup examples as well as vocabulary definitions, and should point to related and prior work. It is also important to give examples of real sites that have suitable content. See Posting markup examples in W3C wikis documentation for details on how to post examples here.

Schema.org proposals can take any form during discussions, but ultimately they should take the form of HTML+RDFa schema definitions; some real examples are in the webschemas area of the W3C Mercurial repository.

Note: When preparing a proposal, we need to know for each type and property, its name and description, alongside examples of usage. There are lots of different ways in which these can be prepared: wiki pages, text files, spreadsheets, PDFs etc. Do note that each property is considered as a global entity, ie. a property called 'foo' gets just one description - you can't give different descriptions for its use with the "Person" type, versus its use with the CreativeWork type.

To search just these proposals, the issue tracker and schema.org-related mailing lists, try a this custom search.

Proposals and Discussion

These proposals are working towards inclusion in changes.html, the file that serves as a log of changes, and for communicating requested changes to the schema.org administrators.

Generally well received and specified, but some detailed discussion re fine-grain detail of comics (imprint, page count etc.). Can those properties be shared with Book/numberOfPages, or ScholarlyArticle? Should PeriodicalSeries be intangible?

Adds a class 'BiologicalDatabaseEntry' as a kind of CreativeWork, introducing 'entryID', 'isEntryOf', 'taxonID'. Adds 'BiologicalDatabase' also subclass of CreativeWork, with no special properties. Both also use 'breadcrumb' from WebPage.

Comments on status, particularly regarding integration, overlaps and open issues.

Brainstorming, Use Cases and Advance Notice

The following topics are under discussion in the Web Schemas Schema.org community, but are not yet approaching specific proposed designs or broad consensus on an approach. Note that this distinction is pretty fuzzy, but some partitioning was needed here due to the number of proposals we're seeing. There is no shame in being listed here rather than as a proposal above!

Guidance on how to cite external enumerations, including constrained values for properties, and large collections of useful types.

For example, it should be possible to use lists of countries from e.g. ISO, UN. Or units and measures from systems such as QUDT. Or community or professionally-maintained lists from Wikipedia, Library or GIS standards, etc.

Blog post covers initial/core design; further work will include lists of known authorities.

Schema.org already had Offer and related terms, but benefitted from adding detail from Good Relations. Controlled values are still at purl.org GR URLs, and Good Relations continues as an independent project.

"While schema.org already supports marking up offers to sell products (pre-transaction), it does not currently provide schema for the common kinds of confirmations and notifications around orders (post-transaction)".

A proposal for adding accessibility metadata to all Creative Work content, done in concert with LRMI

Added four properties to CreativeWork to enable better discovery of accessible content.

Wiki markup

We have two templates for use here: Template:SchemaDotOrgProposal which takes 'name' and 'status' parameters, and which returns a one line page header for proposals; also Template:SchemaDotOrgTerm, which takes a 'term' parameter and returns a simple hyperlink to that (class) term on schema.org.